Before pouncing upon me for posting a tasteless spoof, let me forewarn you that this is NOT a spoof. It is for real, and any nausea you feel should be directed against the actual cause, not your humble messenger.

Nevertheless you can check it all out for yourself. It is there in black and white. Never mind that the Israeli mainstream media have hidden the story for the past 11 years, trying to protect the rep of the Labor Party's daffiest leader.

Israel's Minister of Education, Yael "Yuli" Tamir, has campaigned publicly for the common form of female mutilation in the Third World known as "Clitoridectomy." It means what you think it means. "Yuli," back in 1996 when she launched her campaign, was a Professor at Tel Aviv University and had just joined Labor. Previously she had been Shulamit Aloni's sidekick in the "RATZ" party. She was in the news the past few weeks for proposing that Arab students in Israel learn from textbooks that portray Israel's very existence and creation as a "Naqba" or catastrophe.

The "Boston Review" is a left-leaning political and literary quarterly in Boston, the sort "anarchists" read. In its summer 1996 issue it ran Tamir's own article entitled, "Hands Off Clitoridectomy." Its theme was that all those Westerners expressing revulsion at the practice of slicing up female genitalia in certain parts of the world are themselves evil insensitive chauvistic philistine racists. Westerners should stop criticizing and allow the Third World to carry on with its enlightened multicultural clitorectomies.

She rants thus in the article:

'In discussions about multiculturalism, clitoridectomy is now the trump card, taking over the role once played by cannibalism, slavery, lynchings, or the Indian tradition of Sati: "Is this the kind of tradition you would like to protect?" liberals ask embarrassed multiculturalists, who immediately qualify their cultural pluralism. Clitoridectomy defines the boundary between us and them, between cultures we can tolerate and those we must condemn....

'Furthermore, it seems clear that Western conceptions of female beauty encourage women to undergo a wide range of painful, medically unnecessary, and potentially damaging processes -- extreme diets, depilation, face lifts, fat pumping, silicone implants. Of course, adult women do these things to their own bodies, and, it is said, their decisions are freely made. But would our gut reaction to female circumcision be very different if it were performed on consenting adults? It is not unlikely that girls at the age of 13 or 14, who are considered in traditional societies as adults mature enough to wed and bear children, would "consent" to the mutilation of their bodies if they were convinced that marriage and children were contingent on so doing. Many women who followed the tradition of Sati seemed to do it as a matter of choice....

'But our own culture fosters false beliefs of a similar kind. According to Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth, some 75 percent of women aged 18-35 believe that they are fat, whereas only 25 percent are medically overweight.1 Still more heartbreaking is the fact that the majority of the 30,000 women who responded to a Glamour questionnaire preferred losing 10-15 pounds to success in work or in love. So the fostering of such beliefs cannot differentiate their culture from our own and explain our hostility to it....A fulfilling sex life is certainly one good, but there are others. ...

'My purpose, however, is not to justify clitoridectomy, but to expose the roots of the deep hostility to it -- to reveal the smug, unjustified self-satisfaction lurking behind the current condemnation of clitoridectomy. Referring to clitoridectomy, and emphasizing the distance of the practice from our own conventions, allows us to condemn them for what they do to their women, support the struggle of their women against their primitive, inhuman culture, and remain silent on the status of women in our society.'

We have a suggestion for the Olmert government. Remove the worst embarrassment in the cabinet by performing a small procedure of SNIP-SNIP!